Addictive little online games

It’s the Friday before Christmas weekend. Stop pretending you’re trying to get any work done today. Your boss is either off on vacation already or has her feet up on the desk, waiting for the appropriate hour to sneak off for a “late lunch” and never come back. To help you in your final hours of pre-holiday work, I compiled a list of some addictive online games, easy to play but hard to master. Have hours of fun. Go on, you deserve it.

Line Rider - You know it, you love it. This is the new version, just released.

A couple weeks ago my roommates and I played Winterbells competitively. After two days of trash talking and drama, I got 4 488 346 789 835 480 (over 4 quadrillion) points. Since Winterbells does not display such high scores, I had to find a program to extract it. Then I retired.

i generally find most casual games at jayisgames.com. It’s run very well by recent RIT grad and sometimes-game-designer jay bibby and has a quality and thoughtfulness level similar to that of kottke. He’s a big fan of ferry halim (winterbells, et al) and on (grow, tontie, etc) and other good game designers and they participate in the generally fun-to-read comments. also the customizable favorites menu is sweet!

Family Feud Holiday isn’t worth buying even at half off, but many of the other games (such as Jewel quest solitaire and Bookworm Adventures - the biggest budget for a casual game - are worth trying and buying if you like it.

I see Big Fish also has a sale through Jan 1 with 25% everything and up to 70% off on a few games (including the original Mystery Case Files for $6).

If you sign up for the Gamezebo newsletter, sometimes have offers to beta test games (though usually only for PCs which dominate casual games though that is slowly changing - Big Fish has a Mac games section and Gamehouse has a lot of mac games and you get SuperCollapse for for free for mac or PC if you sign up for their newsletter.).

And Casual Games Blogs aggregates Gamezebo, Jay is Games, and several blogs from game developers.

I got 2.7 seconds on finger frenzy. I spent at least an hour doing it, kind of left me in a trance. I can see how 1 second is possible (the top score) but my fingers would need to be replaced by more nimble ones to beat it. Oddly enough I think that this game is going to help my typing more than alot of other typing tutors. I now know where all the keys are for typing and can find any of them in a very little time. Wow this is very uninteresting. Sorry for anyone who actually read this comment.

You know, you could have warned a brother about Mothetload. I saved $149000 to buy a diamond tip, saved the game, shut down the computer, woke up the next day to get the last $51000 and was told there were no saved games. I DIDN’T KNOW I HAD TO KEEP THE $%@#%$! BROWSER WINDOW OPEN!!! MERRY %$#!@$#% CHRISTMAS!

Beating Motherload was absolutely the highlight of my Christmas Eve. The bonus after you drill past everything was a fun suprise. Be sure to stock up on a hundred or more big and small bombs and even more health packs! *hint hint!*

Finger Frenzy doesn’t work on the Dvorak keyboard on my Mac, which makes me sad. I can get up to S, but it seems to disallow any of the keys that would be punctuation on the QWERTY keyboard (S falls on the key labelled ‘;’). Shame, I was surprising myself up to that point.

This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.